Rosabeth Moss Kanter, “Enduring Principles for Changing Times”
November 12th, 02007 by Stewart Brand
Principles against panic
“Everything looks like a failure in the middle.” Any new enterprise, Kanter explained, encounters roadblocks. As the obstacles multiply, the situation looks hopeless. That’s when deeply held principles and and the long view are most needed to get you past the panic.
To characterize America’s current winter of discontent she quoted Woody Allen: “One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” Panic leads to abandoning principles, and that is how successes end.
Kanter commends three principles in particular for renewal of the faltering American enterprise…
* Open minds. In the clash between orthodoxy and creativity, opt for the spirit of discovery and progress.
* Higher purpose and sense of meaning.
Kanter noted the emergence of “values-based capitalism.” One example she knows from her own consulting work is IBM. Shortly after the new CEO Sam Palmisano took over in 2002, he instituted an online “ValuesJam” with 300,000 employees. The result was a declaration that IBM stands for “Innovation that matters— for our company and for the world.” She has seen that value played out in IBM public service activities such as the World Community Grid, which engages idle CPU time on computers connected to the Internet (740,000 so far) to solve scientific problems in HIV-AIDS, cancer, muscular dystrophy, and human genomics.
* Common ground. Inclusiveness and shared responsibility is a particularly American principle first noted and celebrated by Alexis de Tocqueville. It is reflected in Bill Clinton’s observation, “Big government is being replaced by big citizens.”
There’s been enough panic and winter in America, Kanter concluded. It’s time for some endless summer. Get out and connect with the street, with nature, with the world.
–Stewart Brand
November 12th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
[…] clipped from blog.longnow.org […]
November 13th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
[…] “Everything looks like a failure in the middle,” warns Rosabeth Moss Kanter. Any new enterprise encounters roadblocks. As the obstacles multiply, the situation looks hopeless. That’s precisely when you need to hold onto lyour principles, your long-term view, to help get you past that panic. Read more at Long Views. […]
November 13th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
I don’t mean to be grouchy, but I found this talk to be rather unenlightening (and this comes from someone who always assumes enlightening until proven otherwise). Open minds, higher purpose, and common ground - is any of this particularly novel? Did Kanter start with a list of principles and whittle it down to these three? And, as asked by Kevin Kelly, why these particular three? Is she open-minded enough to consider other principles, orthodoxy, un-open-mindedness? (Self-reflexive open-mindedness; diversity of diversity.) Her thinking felt noetically flat (principles are equally important), conceptually messy (principles vs. values vs. narratives?), and surprisingly unacademic (reference to “a new form of capitalism” with no unpacking). Again, sorry if I’m being overly critical; I assume the audiences she generally addresses (business students and entrepreneurs?) benefit considerably from her work. But in comparison to previous Long Now seminars, it wasn’t impressive for me.
Of course, I’m open to changing my mind. With the higher purpose. Of standing on common ground. With those of you who did find her enlightening.
November 14th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Absolutely agree with Sequoia Hax. Not a Longnow talk
November 14th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
“Inclusiveness and shared responsibility is a particularly American principle first noted and celebrated by Alexis de Tocqueville”.
I really dislike this kind of generalisation applied as a specific, implied superior national/cultural trait (I feel the same way about Aussie “mateship” too).
de Tocqueville was a man of and by his age; a 19th century French philosopher, ruminating on the “… vicissitudes and practicing the virtues and vices common to savage nations…”, with little if any actual experience of the lives of his observed objects; and this lack of exposure and understanding into the pre-existing, actual social structures of a majority of the Native peoples cultures around the world, seems to me, to excite followers of de Tocqueville’s ideas, to assume that this is somehow a new concept born of a “civilised” nation.
No, sorry to burst your bubbles people, it’s not particularly “civilised” nor American (which American? USian, Mexican, Canadian, Panamanian, Columbian, Peruvian, Mayan, Aztec?).
From pre history, the human traits of inclusiveness and shared responsibility have allowed survival of the species against common threats (stampeding mammoths, leaping sabre tooth tigers, ice ages, floods, famines etc.).
It’s hard wired into our genes. The only difference is that here in the 21st century, those of us living in “the west”, having spent so many decades under the sway of capitalism, arm in arm with “individualism” and “personal responsibility”, find that when we don’t like what this has brought us to, we cast about like a drowning man flailing for the float ring, and finding it thrown from a dead white aristocrat, shout “Hallelujah!” and seek ownership of it.
I do like “Everything looks like a failure in the middle.” Appeals to my optimism.
November 15th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
Platitudes- delivered with a ring of maudlin mock sincerity. Is this person running for office somewhere?
Moonlighting as a speech writer for someone? The concepts are fine, but we’ve heard every politician ever
make these same noises.
November 17th, 2007 at 9:15 am
Not to fan the flames, but using them to power another query: is it the need for principled thinking that she advocates? (And if so, as opposed to what - unprincipled thinking? Pragmatism? I.e. what are the alternatives to principled thinking?) Or is it these particular principles that she advocates? (And if so, same question as above, as opposed to what - why these principles vs. others? In all cases?) Regardless of our impressions of Kanter’s talk, conceptualizing different ‘types’ of thinking is certainly relevant to the long now…
November 27th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
I found this to an emotional outpouring… Please Long Now… get back on track the last two seminars have been anything but long term thinking on the Long Now’s behalf. Please convince me my membership is worth getting. Thanks in advance.
December 22nd, 2007 at 2:21 am
Trying not to say something that has already been said due to the gap between the seminar and it’s video release :
Vague and outdated.
Is the US facing a crisis today because of lack of principles ?
Are some principles bad and others good ? Do we really need principles ?
Unfortunately, this seminar was given thru the optics of a business school. America is portraited as a corporation that was sucessfull (at a moment in time) and requires reengineering to reclaim the lost market share. While a more post-modern approach would be to stop acting like a modern corporative nation-state.
Open mind, aiming the greater good and common ground are principles that can be tracked down to Nazi Germany. Hitler was very open minded towards science, specially medical scientists that supported ethical discrimination. Let’s not forget that in the 30’s, racial centered researches were “in vogue”. All of Mengele’s research could fit in the “aiming for the greater good” principle, and last, but not least, the main objective in Nazi Germany’s invasions were to secure vital space aka “common ground”.
Science, by itself, is not open minded at all. For one to succeed in any science field, one must struggle to publish the most. Selection Comittees aren’t at all open minded, notably famous institutions receive much more bandwidth than obscure distant colleges. There are several stories of scientists that had papers rejected at first and succeeding publishing them only 20 years later, after a lifetime of struggle.
There is no such thing as one-way open-mindness, a cleric who refuses to accept science is as bad as a scientist who refuses to accept that people may have religious beleifs. I cannot percieve someone like Richard Dawkins as an open-minded person.
And regarding politics, all politics are open minded by default, otherwise they don’t maintain themselfs in power. How do you vote in a ecological bill when you were elected by a conservative religious group ? You may end up partnering with a gay activist if both percieve that by doing this some gain will be obtained.
The war in Iraq was issued by the latter two principles, aiming a greater good - by taking Saddam off power and getting rid of the WMDs - and Common ground, by protecting it.
January 21st, 2008 at 1:38 am
What an awful load of doublespeak. The speaker doesn’t make any sense at all. It really sounds like any “new american century” soundbite ever. Terrified to hear this speech on long now. I kept wishing that the audience and Steward Brand would’ve had the guts to tell her off. She may have been a great mind in the past but this seminar makes her sound like a ***nken c*rporate ***re.
May 31st, 2008 at 1:04 pm
As someone who is not a citizen or resident of the United States of America, this was the first talk of this series where I did not feel at all implicated, or even *talked to*. Hopefully it will be the last one. Please, no more talk where the speaker addresses only Americans. Or does the Big Here stop at US borders?